An American physicist from Chicago is celebrating a Nobel Prize win for an advanced physics concept he helped formulate more than four decades ago. Yoichiro Nambu, an 87-year-old scientist with the University of Chicago, was one of three recipients of the highly esteemed honor, announced Tuesday.
The prize spotlights the discovery of a particle physics process called "spontaneous broken symmetry." Nambu -- who was born in Japan but has been in the U.S. since the early ’50s -- shares the Nobel with two Japanese physicists, Makoto Kobayashi and Toshihide Maskawa. Nambu will receive US$650,000, while the other two winners will split that sum, taking about $325,000 apiece.
Spontaneous broken symmetry, in its most basic explanation, seems simple: Things that we observe to be symmetrical in nature can suddenly and almost randomly lose their symmetry. The concept is a key part of advanced particle physics theories, but it can be seen in everyday instances -- such as if you were to place a pencil vertically on a table, with its flat eraser end balanced on the surface.
"If you just either sneeze or frankly leave the thing alone, it may not be perfectly balanced and it’ll fall off to one side or the other," Rhett B. Herman, a professor of physics at Radford University, told TechNewsWorld. Read more...
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